Climategate and consensus nonsense

Cato’s Pat Michaels, one of the scientists attacked in the Climategate emails, has an excellent editorial in the Wall Street Journal today with examples of how the scientists promoting catastrophic global warming shut out dissident voices in supposedly peer-reviewed journals.

Michaels notes that the EPA finding of endangerment from CO2 emissions, based on the tainted research of the Climategate emailers, should be called into question. He writes:

The result of all this is that our refereed literature has been inestimably damaged, and reputations have been trashed. Mr. Wigley repeatedly tells news reporters not to listen to “skeptics” (or even nonskeptics like me), because they didn’t publish enough in the peer-reviewed literature—even as he and his friends sought to make it difficult or impossible to do so.

Ironically, with the release of the Climategate emails, the Climatic Research Unit, Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley have dramatically weakened the case for emissions reductions. The EPA claimed to rely solely upon compendia of the refereed literature such as the IPCC reports, in order to make its finding of endangerment from carbon dioxide. Now that we know that literature was biased by the heavy-handed tactics of the East Anglia mob, the EPA has lost the basis for its finding.